MALE GAZE AND FEMALE OBJECTIFICATION IN DORIS LESSING’S A WOMAN ON A ROOF
MALE GAZE AND FEMALE OBJECTIFICATION IN DORIS LESSING’S A WOMAN ON A ROOF

Summary/Abstract: Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2007. Her works are known for her enthusiastic support of modern feminism and she is acknowledged not only for her novels, that promote the idea of equality between men and women, but she is also known as one of the best short-story writers. Although many of the female characters in Lessing’s short stories “seem unable to be”, as Orphia Allen puts it in her essay, “Structure and motif in Doris Lessing’s A Man and Two Women”, because they are “grooming themselves as objects to snare men” (Allen, 1980), it is not the case of the female protagonist in “A Woman on a Roof”. Unlike other women portrayed by Lessing, who end up being captive either in oblivious motherhood or in some kind of plaintive romantic love, the unnamed protagonist in the story discussed does not resolve to let herself become an easy prey to men and their gaze. The male gaze, a phrase suggested by Laura Mulvey, refers to the way women are taken as objects used to produce male pleasure. Lessing’s female protagonist becomes objectified in the sense that she serves as the “locus of the male’s desire to savor [her] visually.” (Noell Carroll) The imagery Lessing uses in her short story is structured in such a way as to offer an understanding of the context of male dominance. This means that men have not only the political and economic power to control women, who become objects, but also the control of those institutions that produce culture and ideologies.

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